Any Other Photo {Penny and Sam}

There’s very little I can say about Penny’s Any Other Photo submission. I mean, I could rave about her dress, her hair, that glimpse of tulley-pouffy-goodness veil, the make-up, THAT CAKE! and Penny and Sam’s undeniable and infectious joy…but whatever you can see when you first look at this picture, it probably isn’t what Penny and Sam see. And therein lies the beauty of this series and the oh-so-amazing thing about our wonderful community-as long as you are sharing, we’re always learning.

Approximately 100 friends and family are standing behind the photographer, expectantly waiting for us to cut the cake. They have been standing there for about five minutes. We have so far spent an entire five minutes trying to find a knife to cut the cake. This has involved me waving my arms and shouting “The knife! The knife!” as if hoping to make it fall from the sky. Eventually, New Husband realises his New Wife does not have magical powers. New Wife has actually forgotten to pack the knife to cut the cake, which is their normal cooking knife, because she used it to make dinner last night. Shouting something along the lines of “for Freddy’s sake!“ New Husband grabs a plastic cake slice from the dessert table. This will do.

We now both have the cake slice, so flimsy and impractical and unphotogenic, gripped in our hands. 100 friends and family stand poised with cameras and drinks. They have waited five minutes. NOW will they cut the cake?

No. Because we have now realised we don’t have a clue where to cut it. Our cake is beautiful and enormous (we discovered the day before it actually feeds twice as many guests aswe had coming, and we already had a cake table that would easily feed another 200) . Nobody tells you whetherto cut the top, the middle or the bottom. And let’s face it, we both know this cake slice is probably going to snap the minute we plunge it into the fondant anyway, and this isn’t how we imagined this happening in our heads, afterwe thought we’d planned everything as well as we could, and oh heavens above will this pressure of having to do thingsand people expectingus to know what we’re doing ever end…..

So we scream.

I choose this photo. It’s not one we picked to get processed, because there is a much nicer one of us having actually managed to cut the cake (top tier, mind the toppers, and plastic does cut through fondant, you just need to saw at it a bit). But out of the chaos and disorder of our wonderful wedding day came this.

It is not pretty.

It is our primal scream.

All the stress of the months and days building up to it, all the things that went wrong in the frenzy of the day itself, the fact that we both knew we didn’t really have a clue what we were doingfor pretty much the whole time… (aside the from the fact that we love each other very, very much) and at that moment we were slap bang in the middle of it all and we still just didn’t know whether we were doing it right. Or if doing it right even mattered. I think that’s what we’re screaming at.

And, five weeks into married life, we are still two people standing together, making it up as we go along. And we’ve decided that’s actually just fine.

7 Comments

What a fantastic image and write up! It's so true, you just kind of bumble along through your wedding day trying to act like you know what you're supposed to be doing! Congratulations to you and your husband ps. your dress and the sneak peek of your veil really do look rather fabulous!

AIIIEEE it's like Christmas…we have Penny's Any Other Photo up! I have been excited about today for far too long. Penny I love love love this. Especially the part about not having a clue what you were doing. The screaming captures it perfectly. Everyone should scream a bit on W-day.

I love the line "We don't need to scream anymore" and the thought of you not knowing which part of the cake to cut. That is totally something wedding magazines don't tell you! I think we went for the bottom tier, what about you?

Ah Penny Penny Penny, you are KILLING ME with that dress/veil combo. I must see your wedding photographs in all their glory or my life shall be a life half lived.

Thankyou all for being so lovely! I have been so geekily excited about being on AOW.

I find it ridiculous that we sat so stoically and gracefully on all that tension for the entire day, then waited until absolutely every guest was in the room before we lost the plot. Another gin and it could have been a food fight. Now imagine what kind of Any Other Photo that would have been… !!

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Hello! We're Clare, Aisling and Anna and welcome to a corner of
the world where smart, flawed, real women talk about the bigger
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of being a woman today, from marriage to feminism to pretty, too.